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Month: March 2018

This chapter of The Obstacle is the Way inspired me a little, but then I got a bit more… critical, I suppose. It starts off describing ‘the process’ in a sports metaphor. That’s not my thing, so I’ll use an example from later in the chapter.

After describing ‘the process’ as breaking tasks down into manageable chunks and focusing on them, the story of James Pollard Epsy is presented.

Unable to read and write until he was eighteen, Espy attended a rousing speech by the famous orator Henry Clay. After the talk, a spellbound Epsy tried to make his way toward Clay, but he couldn’t form the words to speak to his idol. One of his friends shouted out for him: “He wants to be like you, even though he can’t read.”

Clay grabbed one of his posters, which had the word CLAY written in big letters. He looked at Espy and said, “You see that, boy?” pointing to a letter. “That’s an A. Now youve only got twenty-five more letters to go.”

Espy had just been gifted the process. Within a year, he started college.

I don’t care how hard Espy worked, I can’t help but think that college admissions were easier back then.

Still, the idea is simple: if you know the steps to do, a project seems pretty basic. And, in his way Ryan Holiday mentions projects we can work on: a book, a novel, a new skill or an instrument. Each of them, he says, are about understanding the process and doing what needs to be done today.

And I get that. You won’t make progress if you only spend your time being overwhelmed.

However, if your process is simply to break a 50,000 word manuscript into 500 words per day, after a hundred days you’ll have your 50,000 words, but that’s not to say that you’ll have a novel. I think that the idea of ‘trusting the process’ only makes sense if you’re constantly re-evaluating the process (possibly that’s a process step that’s so self-explanatory that it needn’t be mentioned).

If, for example, you want to get good at making “things” online (as I do), how much should I focus on finishing up the one website I have working, and how much should I focus on the next thing? Either one of them presents enough work to fill all my free time.

I try to navigate this unknown territory by committing to having Dynamic-EFL.comfinished, if only so that I know that I can finish things. But, the more I think “it’s almost finished,” the more I realize how much more could be added to it. So, I have one more review activity I want to add, and some polishing I want to do to the interface, and I’ll declare it done.

Then, I rationalize I can work on trying to attract users (something I’ve started doing) and get that extra experience and (hopefully) skillset while I work on the next thing.

Still, the idea of “a process” seems best suited to things like playing basketball or learning an instrument, where a lot of people have gone before you and signposted some best practices. When it comes to just getting the most out of my life, the “process” only tells me not to sit on my hands.

Something really positive happened last Tuesday. A student was frustrated that I had forgotten to bring the reading assignment, and I had to pass a sheet of paper around so that students could write down their email addresses to get it sent to them.

That hasn’t happened before.

New Spork City

Did you know that I wrote a series of stories set in the fictional “New Spork City” (the stories are available here, or will be as they get revised and edited.) I’ve been handing out one story every week since classes re-started for me at the beginning of this month.

My goal with the stories were pretty simple:

I wanted students to have a positive English encounter. Sometimes I get too deep into the ‘English Workout’ metaphor and everything is just work, work, work. Some students already have ‘fun English’ built into their lives, but for those that don’t have a chance to relax with English, they needed something that wasn’t homework.

There is an advantage to having a cast of likable characters that we can eventually revisit. If I could get a few people who the groups seemed to like hearing about, we could use them in other contexts, the way you can use “Jack Sparrow” with people who all love the Pirates of the Carribean movies.

Obviously, I am in favor of people reading. If this is a stepping-stone to students reading ‘real’ English, I’m in favor of it. (Or even reading more in their native language. Reading is good for everyone.)

The more ‘good English’ my students are exposed to, the sooner they’ll (hopefully) develop an ‘ear’ for English. I want people to be able to hear their own mistakes, and if they only ever hear their classmates speaking, that will take longer.

So, I wrote up a collection of stories, setting some constraints for myself:

Each story was no longer than a single A4 page, on one side.

Each story describes an entire situation or interaction. They all end with “to be continued” but only because the drama is never over. So far, stories cover a father and daughter in a restaurant, a few first encouters, a family planning dinner. But they cover it all the way to the end (though, obviously, not is much depth, see the first bullet point).

The characters speak ‘native’ English… but a little better. That is to say, they say things like “lend a hand” and “help yourself” which needs to be explained (more on that in the next bullet point) but they always do it using good grammar. Nobody says “you got a minute?” They would all say “do you have a minute?” I get that it’s not ‘native’ English, but have a look at the point above about these being a stepping stone.

I want my students to, in the best case, read the story in one sitting without the assistance of a dictionary. To that end, I imagine them getting a lot out of context (they are all fairly universal situations, adults know what happens in these situations) and I provide footnotes for words or phrases where I imagine them stumbling. There is one group that I have in mind when I write them, and I think “if they can read this, things will be fine.”

The reception

I pass the stories out in six lesson. On the first day, I explained that they don’t have to read them, but that I’m going to pass out the eleven that are already written and we’ll talk about whether they were helpful or not afterwards. Since then, I’ve asked once or twice “are you reading these” as I pass them out, and the answers are generally positive.

People like to ask about the funny names (see me and my love of absurdity). The landlady in the story is named Mrs. Geldsack (German for ‘Moneybags,’ basically.) and they love that.

And, more than one person has said they look forward to knowing what happens next. “I don’t think they’re super exciting stories,” I tell them. “I’m not Dan Brown.”

“That’s because you know what will happen.” Was the answer from one student.

And then, on Tuesday this week, I didn’t print out the next story because, well, it’s not automatic for me, yet. And, I got to class, had a good lesson, and, in the end, a student asked: “do you have the next story?”

I am an OpenOffice fan. Not because I hate Microsoft. I’ve outgrown that. Not even only because it’s free, though that helps. I like OpenOffice because it feels like the word processing programs I’ve grown up with. And I’m comfortable in it.

I like that the keyboard shortcuts that work everywhere ([CTL]+[B] for bold) work in it, instead of Microsoft Office’s weird [S’HIFT]+[CTR]+[F] for bold, even if fett is the German word for bold.

But, polishing up the New Spork City worksheets, I wanted to add footnotes to text in a textbox. And it’s not possible. And I don’t see why that should be. (To be fair, I just checked and it doesn’t seem to be possible in Microsoft Office, either.)

I enjoyed this chapter of The Obstacle is the Way more than the last one. It didn’t seem to be as cliché, and it talked about iterating, which is something I’d already believed in.

The first concept introduced is the idea of the “Minimum Viable Product.” It’s something you’ll hear about if you follow startups much, the idea that you make the smallest possible version of your product and see what people say. (Rather than, as I seem to have done, making a full-featured product and then releasing it to the world.)

The idea is that, people will tell you what’s great, what needs to change, and your product can grow into greatness, rather than you needing to brainstorm that greatness locked away in solitude.

Or, on the other hand, if nobody likes what you’ve made, you move on to the next thing having lost as little as possible.

I like the idea.

Ryan Holiday goes on to say this:

In a world where we increasingly work for ourselves, are responsible for ourselves, it makes sense to view ourselves like a start-up — a start-up of one.

And that means changing our relationship with failure.

Maybe it’s because I enlisted back when “an Army of one” was a thing, but I loved that. And, I loved that he went on to say:

The chapter is a good one, but that’s the core of it right there. (The only historical anecdotes are back to Rommel in the desert again.) but there is one more thing I wanted to quote, beginning with a question that the reader is hypothetically asking him or herself:

Well, why would I want to fail? It hurts.

I would never claim it doesn’t. But can we acknowledge that anticipated, temporary failure certainly hurts less than catastrophic, permanent failurE? Like an good school, learning from failure isn’t free. the tuition is paid in discomfort or loss and having to start over.

I think that’s all true and, on that note, I’m off to start paying my tuition.

(As an aside, the Work Life Podcast has a great episode about embracing negative feedback, but I can’t see how to link to individual episodes.)

A brief foray into AdWords

Part of the appeal of the whole “let me start a website and try to monetize it” thing is getting a look behind the scene at how these financial mechanisms of the Internet work. My life has exposed my quite a lot to the technical mechanisms of the Internet, but I only vaguely knew that “advertising is big business.”

So, having declared the Dynamic-EFL.com website to be officially finished (I now have a list of changes I want to make, so … whatever), I rationalized it was time to try and get some users who I don’t know.

I opened an account with Google’s AdWords.

The process of opening the account was painless, and making the ad was just like the YouTube tutorials I watched. However, it wasn’t easy because I tend to be a long-form writer, not the kind of guy who gets things said in six words. (Have you noticed that about me?)

Still, I got the add made, I was happy. This is how it looked:

(Fun fact: having that inline here still makes some part of my brain crazy, as I can feel myself trying not to read it.)

Advertising is expensive

I tried searches with the keywords I decided to market against. There were no ads shown to me (thinking my adblocking software might be the reason, it tried it in incognito mode and Firefox), it seemed reasonable to think that I wasn’t competing against many people in Google’s complex ad-auctioning system.

I set the price to €6/day for three days. It seemed like money I could afford, and it was hard to know what to expect.

My brief ad campaign

You can see how things went. Two dollars per click seems like a lot of money. Especially considering, when it was finished, I checked and there were no new user accounts, meaning people came, looked, and were not interested.

What I think I’ve learned

So, what have I learned? Well, I re-examined the landing page and have decided that it needs to be polished. I’d like it to reflect me as a person doing a thing more than looking like some impersonal internet software. After all, I’m a likable guy, right?

Further, I think it needs to more quickly move into the information of what can this site do for you? Because, humility aside, I think I have a compelling argument for the site being really useful.

My mistake, I think, was that, although I know I need the opinions of people who don’t know me, I didn’t put myself in the headspace of someone coming to the site.

The next campaign

I don’t know when it will be. I mean, I have some work to get done, some behind-the-scenes things I’m still working on (I’d like to be able to add resources, outside the worksheet creation process) and I still teach English more or less full time.

Still, when I come back to this, I’m going to target all of Germany, rather than my region, and use more limited keywords, rationalizing that people who come to the site looking for EFL vocab worksheets are more likely to be interested in what I have to offer than people who want EFL grammar worksheets (which my site does not create).

The most recent chapter in my continuing reading of The Obstacle is the Way is all about persistence and, to be honest, it’s exactly what you’d think.

The chapter starts with Ryan Holiday relating a story of General Ulysses S. Grant besieging Vicksburg. Challenges are enumerated, obstacles recounted. Distractions are mentioned. And, do you know what? Grant takes the town in the end, proving all the naysayers wrong.

The next story is of Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb. You know that story, but it does include a cameo from Nikola Tesla, which seems worth recounting:

Nikola Tesla, who spent a fustrated year in Edison’s lab during the invention of the lightbulb, once sneered that if Edison needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would “proceed at once” to simply “examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.”

The fact that that paragraph ends with “Well, sometimes that’s exactly the right method” pretty much sums up the whole message: get ready to work hard.

You can probably tell I’m a little sarcastic about the whole thing, partly because it seems cliché and partly because it seems like bad advice. (Some obstacles just won’t be overcome — you’re not going to head-butt your way through a concrete wall.)

However, later in the chapter, there is this paragraph:

Once you start attacking an obstacle, quitting is not an option. It cannot enter your head. Abandoning one path for another that might be more promising? Sure, but that’s a far cry from giving up. Once you can envision yourself quitting altogethr, you might as well ring the bell. It’s done.

I find that paragraph to be the most valuable of all that is in the chapter.

I guess that “work harder, not smarter” doesn’t seem like great advice. And, the “examine every straw” seems like the worst way to find a needle in a haystack. In fact, I think that we’re under an obligation to make the most out of the time that we have, and I think that if a certain approach isn’t yielding results, you have to start looking for the one that will.

(In an unrelated note, I seem to be happy to consider jumping between projects.)

I get the idea that you can’t give up too early, but I certainly think it’s just as wrong to never give up. Maintain the original objective, but be willing to rethink how you’ll get there.

More than simply saying “practice persistence,” I think it’s valuable to gain some insight into what kind of things you get better at with persistence (and what kinds of things just don’t get better, not matter how much you try and try) and how to benchmark, even informally, whether or not you’re making progress or just spinning your wheels.

So, my takeaway from this chapter is this: be persistent, but be willing to change what you’re being persistent at.

A project is finished

I’m planning to wind down the “actively developing” part of the worksheet generator app this week. It’s weird to think that I will then (well, really, already do now) have a project that is finished.

It is my first finished project.

But, that leaves me wondering what I’m going to be devoting my energies towards. I really enjoyed working towards something, and I’ve been wondering what to get at. There are, of course, a few candidates:

User administration

Originally, the next thing I thought I would be tackling would be creating some Model objects and views for user administration in Django. The logic is simple: I’ve been creating a disorganized hack of these things as I realize I need them. Wouldn’t it be better to have something unified?

Further, I’ve never created an app to be reused in Django. I know it can be done, and I’m certainly smart enough, so why not focus on that? I was thinking that it could incorporate the following, at least:

Integrating that wonderful “signup with Google” and “login with Google” functionality that I like in other sites

Support for beta testers and normal users

Payment integration, as well as support for “you haven’t paid” account locking and “your account expires on” account management.

Tools to see how many users are regularly using a website

Tools to automatically notify inactive account owners of impending deletion, and then, of course, to automatically delete said accounts.

Arbitrary numbers of user properties, as well as the ability for the administrator to sort users by those properties and to send mass emails. (Meaning: the ability to send an email to all the beta testers in Germany, for example)

However, I’m finding that, as I wind down work the worksheet generator (and look forward to spending no small amount of energy creating resources for it to use), I’m not very excited about tackling that. Though, logically, user management would be something I’d use before tackling the fantasy pilgrimage.

Fantasy Pilgrimage

Something I’ve thought about for a while, it remains in that golden sweet spot where “project I think people would use” and “project I think I can accomplish” overlap. The idea is simple: integrate with the Google Fit API to allow a user to set a start and finish point for a “fantasy pilgrimage” and then show on a map how far they would have progressed towards that destination, if all of the movement captured by Google Fit (or whatever app is integrating with it) were dedicated towards that.

In short: if all of my runs were strung together in a long line (rather than being circles that always end back where they started), how close would I be to the city of Rome?

It would have the advantage of being a usable web application that would give me some hands-on API experience, but it does seem to require the user management, and I just don’t seem too excited about that, for whatever reason.

But, I could move away from coding and try focusing on writing for a time. That’s the next candidate project.

The heartbreaking truth behind Destiny 2

This is a simple writing project that I keep thinking about whenever I play Destiny 2. I don’t play often (Sundays, with my brother), but it’s the only video game I do play. Back when we played Halo, I tried my hand at fan fiction where the Halo world intersected with the world you and I know. (My brother couldn’t play because he had to go to a wedding, so, of course, I wrote a story of him being at a wedding when a drop ship began disgorgin aliens and he alone was able to kill them all.)

The thing is, Destiny 2 doesn’t have really strong characters that I want to incorporate into fan fiction. Instead, we keep noticing details about the game that we love, and wondering how the developers came to settle on them. I’d like to write up those fake stories. (Including a cast of completely fictional programmers and their internal feud with the people in human resources).

It would be a change, but I don’t know that I’d be as proud of what I built as I am of the worksheet generator.

That brings me to the idea of creating an app.

ESL Detective game

Pirating parts of the idea of a boardgame that my kids play, I had a great idea for a mobile-device-based listening game for ESL students. The idea is this: with a very simple menu, students have to play the role of detectives solving a robbery. As they pass the device around, each person takes turns making decisions, but has to consult the group (sparking, I hope, conversation).

There’s nothing to watch, but everything you learn is played via audio. Like most teachers I know, I have good bluetooth speakers that everyone in the classroom could hear at once. That means everyone learns everything simultaneously, and that there would be paper on the table on which to record the things we learned.

Basically, as you moved through the story, you would learn things like:

Susan is very short

Edgar speaks German

The thief was very tall

Paula has short, grey hair

And, students would have to record these things on “suspect cards.” Eventually, as more is learned about each suspect, as well as about the thief in general, the class should be able to successfully accuse one in-game player.

It seems like it would generate conversation, practice listening, and be a change from normal classroom activities. So, of course I’m in favor of it.

I like the idea so much that I’ve started watching YouTube live-coding videos of people making apps with Flutter (which promises to make it possible to create apps for both android and iOS), but I’ve had trouble installing Flutter myself. (It doesn’t seem to find components that I think I’ve installed.)

Still, this is the one I’m most excited about, and it seems like it would be pretty straight-forward if I could get flutter working:

Plot out the story

Assign a few friends to read for me

Put the app together in a series of button interfaces

Test it in a classroom

It’d let me try creating an app, uploading things to the various play stores, and it would be useful to people outside Germany (unlike the worksheet generator, at the moment).